2) The role of the tobacco settlement: One of our favorite places is Danville is a complex known as the Institute for Advanced Learning and Research. It’s a set of modern buildings on a hill near the Danville airport, east of downtown. The title of the institute may seem overly ambitious, but the existence of this research center represents a serious effort to correct a regional weakness, and to apply unusual resources to that end.

The weakness is Danville’s distance from established, big research universities. Virginia Tech, in Blacksburg, is two-plus hours away by car, and so is the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville. Those in North Carolina are far enough away not to have Danville within their force field for attracting students and faculty, or fostering spin-off research companies. We heard time and again that the lack of higher-ed centers reflected the wishes of mill leadership during Danville’s long run as a textile-and-tobacco town. In those days, it was more convenient for the mills if the locals lacked choices in schooling and occupation.

The institute (as I’ll call it from here on) represents a conscious attempt to bring to the region much of what a university would provide—apart, of course, from the thousands of on-scene students. It has evolved to offer many of the spin-off functions you’d associate with a serious state university: research projects, start-up spaces, training partnerships with companies, alliances with local schools and NGOs, development centers for advanced manufacturing, and a general sense of involvement with the economic future of the community. You can read in detail about its five main divisions here. It is an impressive operation.

When I talked with the institute’s director, Mark Gignac, at the headquarters, he described projects similar to those we’d seen be successful elsewhere—and also one that was unique, the Industrial Hemp Summit. Industrial hemp uses have almost nothing to do with the liberalized marijuana laws in many states and a lot to do with potential commercial and scientific uses of hemp and its components. This is a subject that companies, universities, and governments around the world are taking very seriously because of its industrial- and health-care-related possibilities. And it is one in which some of the same areas of the country that have been economically battered by tobacco’s collapse enjoy natural advantages.

“Two hundred years ago, Virginia was the leading exporter of hemp in the world,” Gignac told me. The same sort of soil that favors tobacco is also good for hemp, which was traditionally used for rope and similar applications, especially in the sailing industry. “People get it confused with marijuana, but we’re talking about something different,” he said—the different versions involving fiber, CBD oil, and other hemp products. “It is important for people to understand that hemp is not just another agricultural product. Hemp is about improving human health.”

“It’s an agricultural crop that is super profitable, I mean super,” he said. “In the good old days, people used to say you could make $4,000 per acre growing tobacco. You can’t do that any more. But in hemp—we’re just getting started, but today you can make between $10,000 and $20,000 per acre, depending on the grade. So you don’t need a lot of acres. And the region here is perfect for this kind of crop.” For more details, you can join the queue to attend the next summit.

Now the larger point about why the institute exists in the first place. This organization that is helping figure out Virginia’s post-tobacco future was set up partly through proceeds from the tobacco industry, through the historic “tobacco settlement.”

Starting with Mississippi’s lawsuit in the mid-1990s, one state government after another began suing Big Tobacco companies because of smoking’s toll on public health. In 1998, as part of a sweeping “master settlement,” the major tobacco companies agreed to pay out a total of more than $200 billion (yes, billion) to more than 40 state governments over the following 25 years.

In most states that never had cigarette or tobacco industries, the money has mainly gone toward public-health efforts or anti-smoking campaigns. But in states like Kentucky, North Carolina, and Virginia, some of the money went toward compensating communities where tobacco growing or cigarette making had been pillars of the economy.

Danville originally grew on the tobacco business. Thus, it received extra payments—some of which went toward creating the Institute for Advanced Learning and Research.

In short: The Danville region’s transition to a new economy got a significant boost from shrewd reuse of after-effects of the old economy.

It makes you wonder what a “master opioid settlement” might do for the parts of the country that have suffered most grievously from this scourge.

3) Investment in broadband: To a degree that is hard to imagine from New York or San Francisco, smaller-town and inland-America communities suffer from too-slow, too-costly internet connections. Here’s a snooty coastal way to make the point: Running a web-based business in many parts of the U.S. is like trying to do the same thing via an airline’s in-flight Wi-Fi.

Danville is an exception. A dozen years ago, it began building a municipally owned high-speed fiber-optic network, which now offers lower-cost, higher-speed connections to existing and start-up businesses than in most communities of its location and size. That network is called nDanville, and you can read about its history and effects here.

A feature in Broadband Communities, called “Danville Transforms Its Economy With Fiber,” gives the overview, including the importance of Danville’s long history with city-owned (rather than privately run) utilities. That article, by Andrew Michael Cohill, said:

Danville’s ownership of its electric utility (it has been in the electric service business since 1876) gave it a significant advantage in deploying fiber. It is the largest of 15 municipalities in Virginia that own electric power distribution services … As in other fiber communities that own electric utilities, city ownership of utility poles eliminates negotiation of pole attachment fees and minimizes the impact of make-ready costs …

As with conventional transportation roadways, the city builds and maintains Danville’s digital roads, but private businesses use the system to deliver broadband services …

The nDanville high-performance fiber network has brought other jobs and businesses to Danville and has helped drive down the cost of Internet access, telephone service and TV service in the city.

“What’s unique is that we don’t sell services direct to the customer,” Jason Gray, the director of Danville Utilities, told me. “We provide the infrastructure, and private companies can compete.” The result, he said (and outsiders confirmed), was that households, start-ups, and established businesses in the community had faster, cheaper internet connections than in most other rural towns.

“It’s an attraction [for] economic development,” Gray told the Community Broadband podcast in 2015. “It’s one less thing we can check off our list—that we do have broadband, and we have scalable broadband that we can offer many different tiers of services, and whatever, basically, the company needs.” This is obviously not in itself the full answer to rural development, but it’s one more step.

• Health conversion foundations offer one more tool for community development.
• The “master settlement” for tobacco was the basis for one community’s equivalent of many of the advantages of a local university.
• Investment in high-speed internet gives smaller, distant towns a better chance to compete for modern, high-value jobs.

Those are some lessons from Danville.

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It was barely 9:00 a.m. by the time of my visit, and the doors were not yet officially open. But the staff and volunteers were already busy putting out fires (figuratively) and preparing boxes of food for the day’s distribution.

Harris’s phones rang, and people popped in and out. One call was particularly time sensitive. A regular volunteer who ran the pickup routes from some of the several local grocery stores that donated to God’s Storehouse was ill and couldn’t make that day’s run. Harris was in search of a replacement—in a hurry—to transport especially the perishables to their warehouse. She scored an easy win. Her first caller would do the job, not only today but until the regular driver could return to duty.

The pantry bustles, serving well over 5,000 households, with 23,000 boxes of food a month. That translates into more than 750,000 pounds of food moved.

Recipients meet one of various criteria. Some are easy to identify, those who already receive benefits through federal or state assistance programs like SNAP (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), Medicaid, or SSI (Supplemental Security Income). Others qualify by various other standards, including proof of income.

I waited a few minutes in the reception area, which was set up like most hospital or DMV spaces I had visited, with a general check-in desk, open seating, and small, semi-protected cubbies, where people can talk privately with staff.

The clients, Harris said, included each and every kind of person you might imagine: the elderly, poor, single-parent families, recently laid off, those looking for work. Danville’s statistics (from the 2017 Regional Report Card compiled with 2016 data by the Danville Regional Fund) on all of the above bear witness to the need. Some 24 percent live at poverty level, (11 percent in Virginia overall); 20 percent are older than 65, (14 percent in Virginia); 60 percent of children live in single-parent households (30 percent in Virginia); and the unemployment rate is almost 9 percent (5 percent in Virginia overall). Also from the report, the 2016 median income in Danville was $33,600, compared with $65,015 in Virginia.

Harris told me a few stories that brought some of these statistics to life:  those who would drop by to say that they had found a job, and wouldn’t need to come by anymore; the numbers of working poor who worried in anticipation of possibly losing their jobs during the government shutdown of early 2017. On shifting demographics, Harris told me that during her seven years at God’s Storehouse, she had noticed an uptick in the elderly.

“One day I would like to be out of business,” Harris said, “But I don’t think that is going to happen.”

The back warehouse was buzzing as volunteers organized, sorted, and boxed the donations. Some of the contents were predictable, like the USDA allotments destined for red boxes, for those on official government assistance. I saw pallets of canned goods. According to the Emergency Food Assistance Program website, the kinds of food distributed also include boxed cereals, beans, dried and long-life milk, rice, grits, oats, canned meat and fish, and on and on.

Some of the food was in blue boxes. These, I learned, were for recipients without the official government designations.

The food at God’s Storehouse included local donations, which came from stores, farmers, markets, individuals with gardens, restaurants, and food purchased by God’s Storehouse, all of which could be more fresh, seasonal, and varied. I peered into boxes with popcorn, bread, cookies, Little Debbie snacks, chips, fruit, tomatoes, greens, peanut butter, mac and cheese, rice, beans, and so much more. Bigger households got more goods in their boxes.

I had seen a similar pantry operation, also with a faith-based origin,  several years ago in western Kansas. Then I accompanied Sister Janice of the Dominican Order of Peace, on her food delivery rounds in the meat-packing community of Garden City. The scale of operation I saw in Danville was much bigger than what I had seen in Kansas. In Garden City, we went first to the small food pantry, loaded a half dozen boxes into Sister Janice’s car, and made the rounds to homes in the trailer parks and modest neighborhoods with mainly Latino residents. The deliveries were a convenience to the recipients but they came with concerns. Sister Janice worried about leaving the boxes on the steps of trailers in the blistering Kansas heat, hoping someone would arrive home to take the perishable goods inside before they spoiled.

God’s Storehouse couldn’t support a delivery system, and getting the boxes into the hands that needed them could be challenging. Lucky recipients lived in nearby affordable housing. Others lived far away—as much as a 2-hour bus ride. Some arrived with friends with cars. Others drove themselves if they had enough gas money. Some could afford gas for the trip only once a month, Harris told me. Taxies and Uber were out of the question.

God’s Storehouse collaborated with many organizations around town. The Malcolm Huckabee Backpacks Program stuffed backpacks with a weekend’s worth of food for 400 Danville elementary school children to take home on Fridays. (Nearly 75 percent of students in Danville public elementary schools qualify for free or reduced lunch. The Regional Report Card says 37 percent of children in Danville lived in poverty in 2016, compared with 16 percent in Virginia overall.) The Virginia Cooperative Extension was holding a cooking class on site the day I visited. Their classes covered not only cooking, but also nutrition, budgeting, and healthy eating.

God’s Storehouse also connects its clientele to information and resources related to their needs, like affordable transportation and cancer prevention and treatments.

Among God’s Storehouse partners with the more colorful names are God’s Pit Crew, a crisis response team, and Hunters for the Hungry, a Virginia nonprofit, which donates venison.

Abutting God’s Storehouse is the new Urban Farm, staffed when I visited by a young AmeriCorps VISTA volunteer named Morgan Zulinke. Morgan was newly arrived in Danville, straight out of Appalachian State University. She had just finished a week shadowing her VISTA predecessor, who had managed to turn this hardscrabble lot into one with promise of an agricultural future. He secured the large lot with a chain link fence, built a dozen or so raised garden beds, erected a domed, plastic-covered hothouse, built a small shed, and planted a few crops.

Morgan had her hands full figuring out how to sustain what had been accomplished and how to push forward. The natural soil was poor quality, so tough that she quickly dismissed the idea of even tilling it. Her shortlist was critical: She needed more dirt, mulch, and more helping hands for more raised beds. What had us both worried, looking at the forlorn sunflowers slumping heavily in the sun and parched earth, was simply water. The big barrel built to capture runoff from the roof of the small equipment shed hadn’t been very effective. There was only this much water, she gestured, suggesting about six inches worth of water in a three- or four-foot-tall barrel. Morgan had hooked up a hose to God’s Storehouse next door before, but she felt it wasn’t fair to tax their resources with big water bills.

We peered at the skies, willing the clouds to head this direction for even a shower. I kept looking upward the rest of the day. Later, as we headed out for the evening, the skies opened up for a downpour. I didn’t mind a bit. Gary Gatewood had gotten our car window closed, and the rain would at least buy some time for Morgan and her urban garden.

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What is perhaps most infuriating about Omaha’s case is that the Jobbers Canyon area survived the worst excesses of Omaha’s version of urban renewal, and was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1986.  I wasn’t there at the time to know whether the National Register nomination was written as an independent act, or was in response to noises that the area was under threat. Possibly both.

So the district was listed in 1986, and in the meantime, the packaged foods company based in Omaha, started looking for a new location for its headquarters. They settled on the area near the Missouri River, the site of Jobbers Canyon Historic District.

The CEO of Conagra was quoted at the time as decrying the area’s “ugly, red brick buildings.” He even went so far, basically, as to blackmail the city, saying that if they weren’t allowed a free hand to build as they wished, Conagra might go elsewhere, perhaps Chicago.

So the city caved—and after the usual legal maneuvers, the district was essentially demolished (parts or it were retained), Conagra built its new headquarters (low, horizontal, suburban-style buildings on a campus with an artificial lake) and the Jobbers Canyon Historic District was de-listed from the National Register in 2002.

The upshot of all of that is that a few years ago, as I was leaving Omaha for a new job in suburban Washington, D.C., Conagra ended up leaving Omaha for—you guessed it—Chicago, and the Merchandise Mart to be specific.

A 2015 report by Christopher Burbach in the Omaha World-Herald, confirming the reader’s rueful account, is here.  A sample:

Omaha made a painful sacrifice to entice ConAgra Foods to build its headquarters downtown in the late 1980s.

City and business leaders agreed to tear down more than 20 historical buildings in Jobbers Canyon—the largest demolition ever of a historic district on the National Register of Historic Places.

In doing so, Omaha erased six city blocks of its history as a center for distributing goods being shipped by rail to the West.

And it wiped out the potential for redeveloping a unique urban canyon of warehouse buildings into businesses and loft apartments in the manner of Omaha’s Old Market.

Omaha is obviously much bigger and more bustling than Danville. But on this particular point, the lesson for other cities would be: Learn in a positive way from Danville, and in a cautionary way from Omaha.

For a previous series of reports on new life for old buildings, please see “Fort Wayne Makes Its Own Luck,” “What Happens to Abandoned Malls?,”  “Dead Malls, Everywhere,” and “Dead Malls, Reborn Cities.”

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1) How it started.  “I think where things really got going was when we finally tore down the Downtowner,” Karl Stauber told me early this month.

For the past dozen years, Stauber has been head of the Danville Regional Foundation, or DRF, which was founded in 2005 with the $200 million proceeds from the sale of a regional hospital to a private health-care firm and has been a major force in educational, cultural, and architectural development in the area ever since. (A year ago, Stauber announced that he would step down as the foundation’s CEO this summer; a DRF official named Clark Casteel will succeed him. For the record, we first learned about Danville, and talked with Stauber and Lori Merricks of the DRF, last year during a book-tour event and regional-development conference that their foundation sponsored. These new accounts are based on our recent return to Danville for a reporting trip. )

The Downtowner, a standard “mid-century modern” motel, had long been an eyesore and blight-generator right in the center of Danville. Ever since it went out of business in the 1980s, city renovation plans had started with proposals to knock it down. Yes, this might seem at odds with efforts to preserve the 19th-century shops and warehouses in the vicinity. But to oversimplify: most people believed that the old buildings had timeless-classic potential, and the Downtowner did not. Take a look, below, and judge for yourself.

In 2012, the city government, the regional foundation, and other organizations were finally able to act. “That really was a turning point,” Stauber told me. “The blighted structure symbolized what was holding us back. It represented the idea that nothing we tried would ever work. And we finally did away with it.” He went on to list other buildings, including a very popular downtown Y built with a view of the Dan River (described by Deb Fallows here), that, by contrast, “symbolized what was possible.”

Around the time demolition crews began taking apart the Downtowner, only about 400 people worked or lived in downtown buildings in the vicinity. This area had been informally known as the tobacco warehouse district; about the time of the demolition, the city started referring to it as the River District.  “Within five years [of the renovation effort], that number went to 4,000,” Stauber told me. “It’s right around 6,000 people in the River District now.”

Rick Barker, the entrepreneur and property developer, offered a complementary measurement.  “There’s about five million square feet of building inventory in the River District,” he told me. “Back when the River District project began, probably four million square feet was entirely vacant, or under-utilized. There’s less than two million feet left now. So half the work has been done.”

Hard economic and demographic indications — occupancy rates, office openings, retail and entertainment sites—obviously are crucial to judging any downtown area’s prospects. “But I keep thinking of the less-scientific measures,” Stauber told me. His foundation’s office is in a restored brick building that once housed tobacco operations, a block from a downtown plaza and fountain. “Ten years ago, you’d hear people say that they would only come downtown to pay parking tickets or get someone out of jail,” he said. But high school proms had happened on the weekend before our visit, and students by the hundreds came to the fountain to have their prom pictures taken. “That tells you something about what people perceive as the cool place to be.”

It would be obvious to any visitor that downtown Danville still has a long way to go. But it’s obvious to us how much further it has gone already than many other places we’ve seen.

2) How it is financed. This will be old news to anyone involved in commercial real estate. But for us, visits to recovering (or decaying) downtowns have been an ongoing education in the role of tax policy as a prime mover in starting or changing urban trends. (For instance, see this previous report by our colleague John Tierney on Allentown, Pennsylvania.)

Specifically in Danville, the tax policies that matter have been from two states, and the federal government. The states are Virginia, which offers builders a 25% tax credit for construction costs on historic-preservation projects like those in Danville — and neighboring North Carolina, which also had such a program but cut it back substantially five years ago.  Both state credits come on top of a 20% federal tax credit for preservation projects, and in effect they dramatically reduced the capital costs for developers interested in restoring warehouses, abandoned factories, old shops, etc. (Do such tax preferences amount to “picking winners”? Sure. But in a tax regime that includes provisions like the carried-interest deduction for hedge-fund managers, I’ll defend the public benefits of this preference any time.)

The Virginia program fostered renewal efforts like those in Danville (and Roanoke and Lynchburg and Charlottesville and elsewhere). The cuts in the North Carolina program (though later partly reversed) enticed developers like those who had transformed tobacco and textile works in Durham and Winston-Salem to look out of state. Virginia was right next door.

Lower construction costs obviously mean that developers can charge tenants lower rent, which in turn lets buildings be occupied more quickly, which in turn adds customers and vitality to the downtown.

3) A test case: Craghead Street. “Coming to Danville now, it’s probably hard for you to imagine what this street used to look like,” the designer and developer Rick Barker, told me at his office in the 500 block of Craghead Street, in the River District.

“I can tell you that just five years ago, there were not two people in this city who wanted this building that we’re sitting in right now, or anything in the block.” The building we were sitting in, which Barker has turned into his office headquarters and is shown in a night shot below, now has a stylish exterior and especially interior hipness that would seem at home in any major city in North America or Europe. That office is on one end of the 500 block of Craghead Street; the shops and buildings along the entire block are part of a renovation effort, driven significantly by historic-preservation tax credits, that Barker’s company has underway.

“This street was named for Doctor Craghead, who was one of Danville’s first city council members,” Barker told me. “Five years ago we said that we wanted to make sure that people stopped calling it Crackhead Street. Our goal was to take the least desirable commercial block in the Dan River District, and make it the most desirable business address in the city. And we are on the way.”

At the other end of that block of Craghead, a restaurant called Mucho has opened up. A promotional video from the opening, which you can see below (or here), shows some of the reaction from both black and white patrons, in a city whose population is about 50-50 black and white.

How much further will the downtown renewal go? As always, it depends. But the distance traveled already is much greater than we would have guessed before we visited.

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Tobacco got going in this region because of a combination of soil and slavery. The soil in central-southern Virginia is part of a belt reaching through North Carolina and Kentucky that is exceptionally favorable for tobacco. (The same territory also favors hemp, which is becoming the basis of another new industry. Stay tuned for more on that, too.) Before the Civil War, it was the home of large tobacco plantations and correspondingly large slave populations.

A fascinating map at Danville’s Museum of Fine Arts and History correlates Virginia’s county-by-county black population in the early 1860s with levels of support by the white population for joining the Confederacy. (It’s different from the map shown above but based on similar data.) The rugged Appalachian west of the state, including what later peeled off to become West Virginia, had very few plantations, low black populations, and also less support for secession. The tobacco heartland around Danville had more plantations, with more slaves, and (among the whites) stronger secessionist views.

After the Civil War, the tobacco industry remained, having shifted from a slave basis to sharecropping and low-wage labor. Auction houses, warehouses, and processing facilities for tobacco transformed the city’s downtown. Many of them were huge brick structures on the streets near the Dan River. An academic history of the area’s economic evolution, Danville, Virginia: And the Coming of the Modern South, by Michael Swanson, details the way that the tobacco industry shaped the physical and economic contours of the region through the 1800s—and how the textile industry, drawn down from New England by the search for lower wages (and hydropower along southern rivers), shaped them after that.

The Danville area, while retaining its tobacco business, also become one of the most important textile centers in the country. An operation eventually known as the Dan River Mills was by the mid-20th century one of the largest textile mills anywhere.

A central theme of Swanson’s book is how rough life within a mill town could be, for people other than owners and managers. Swanson refers to W. J. Cash’s famous coruscation of southern mill culture in his book The Mind of the South, published just before World War II. Part of Cash’s description is so floridly overdone that I won’t quote it in full. (It’s no surprise that as a young man Cash wrote for H. L. Mencken’s usually florid The American Mercury.) Here is a comparatively restrained sample:

The working conditions in the Southern cotton mills were extremely unfavorable. Men and women and children were cooped up for most of their waking lives in the gray light of glazed windows, and in rooms which were never effectively ventilated, since cotton yarns will break in the slightest draft—in rooms which, because of the use of artificial humidification, were hardly less than perpetual steam baths.

The harvest was soon at hand. By 1900 the cotton-mill worker was a pretty distinct physical type in the South; a type in some respects perhaps inferior to even that of the old poor white, which in general had been his to begin with. A dead-white skin, a sunken chest, and stooping shoulders were the earmarks of the breed …

The women were characteristically stringy-haired and limp of breast at twenty, and shrunken hags at thirty or forty. And the incidence of tuberculosis, of insanity and epilepsy, and, above all, of pellagra, the curious vitamin-deficiency disease which is nearly peculiar to the South, was increasing.

The mills’ influence was wide-ranging and profound. Businesses in the area discouraged higher education and brought in workers straight out of public schools. They effectively separated the region’s work force by race—mainly blacks as tobacco workers, whites in the mills—which reduced possibilities for labor cooperation, while reinforcing segregation. Nonetheless, greater Danville was the scene of repeated labor-related and racial strife for half a century after the Civil War, through the Reconstruction era and the beginning of labor organization.

Then, during the civil-rights era of the 1960s, it was again a battleground. Despite the Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954 decreeing an end to “separate but equal” segregated schools, public education and most other aspects of Danville’s life were rigidly segregated into the 1960s. After civil-rights protests and brutal police response in the summer of 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. said that three places where he would focus his efforts would be Montgomery and Birmingham, in Alabama, and Danville.

The main civil-rights confrontation in Danville, on June 10, 1963, was known as “Bloody Monday,” when police used fire hoses and billy clubs against demonstrators. A local grand jury also indicted many of the demonstrators under a pre–Civil War–era law, passed in response to the John Brown abolitionist raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859, that made it a crime to incite “the colored population to acts of violence or war against the white population.”

Just this past week—yes, I mean in June 2019, or 56 years after the original Bloody Monday event—Danville’s police chief, Scott Booth, offered a public “heartfelt apology” to the city’s African American community. He did so at an event honoring Apostle Lawrence G. Campbell Sr., a prominent civil-rights and religious leader, who with his wife had been beaten during the 1963 protests. Campbell has recently published a memoir, 1963: A Turning Point in Civil Rights. In it, he points out how inflexibly segregated the city was in his youth, and the aspects that have changed now: a black mayor, a black superintendent of schools, black members of the city council, and overall a city that “is totally integrated, and blacks are very much a part of its growth.” Like other parts of America, Campbell writes, Danville still exists in “two communities, black and white,” especially in religious organizations. But “it’s come a long way” from 1963, he said at this week’s event with Chief Booth.

Why go through this difficult history? On general principles, because it’s true, and because the background of 19th- and 20th-century strife has shaped the social, economic, and physical realities of the town confronting its 21st-century future. Also, I think it’s worth remembering that an imagined golden age in which households depended on big-factory jobs had its severe drawbacks, too.

But in specific, this background is significant in Danville because it helps explain a highly noticeable aspect of modern Danville’s possibilities: the abundance of historic downtown structures, legacies of the tobacco and textile age, that have outlived their original economic function but give the city new prospects today.

“We actually have more antique architecture than downtown Charlotte or downtown Atlanta”— even though those cities are vastly larger, Rick Barker, of Danville, told me last week. Barker, who is now in his 50s, grew up in the area, worked in sales and packaging design for years, but over the past decade has become one of the leading entrepreneurs behind a revival of former tobacco and textile buildings in what is now called Danville’s River District.

“In the 1970s and 1980s, it was popular in lots of places to tear down antique buildings for surface-level parking,” Barker said. “Well, in the ’70s and ’80s, Danville was still a mill town. We had a mill that was thriving, with thousands of employees.”

Then, through the 1990s and early 2000s, the rest of the state took off in a way that left Danville and Southside behind. “At one point we led the state because we had an agricultural-based economy,” Barker told me. “Now, with the booms in northern Virginia, and the Tidewater, and Richmond, we’ve been left out as a mill town in an ag region. And that mattered because [during the recent economic crisis] there was no reason to tear the buildings down. By that point, we didn’t need parking for anything.”

So during one destructive wave of downtown demolitions, Danville didn’t want to tear down buildings, because they were still profitable. And during the second wave, it couldn’t afford to, because it had so many other problems.

“What we tended to do was just cover them up—just put aluminum on top of an antique facade and say it looks ‘modern,’” Barker told me. “Now it turns out that the aluminum was a pretty good protective cover.”

Starting about 10 years ago, Barker and others in Danville began peeling back the facades. The next installment will describe what they’ve found, how they’re paying for it, where they’re aiming, and what this effort might mean for the future of the town.

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The hotel where my husband, Jim, and I were staying was just a mile upriver from the Y. The woman at reception told me that the best way to get there was to “walk down Riverside Drive to Biscuitville, cross at the light, and go straight to the Riverwalk Trail. That leads to the Y.” So I did just that. Biscuitville was hopping; cars were lined up at the drive-through to pick up morning biscuits. The bike shares were lined up next to the Riverwalk. I meandered along the path, under the lush, overgrown foliage, past a few bridges, the wildlife markers, the local sculpture, and on to the Y.

Sarah Folmar, the CEO of the Y, showed me around. We toured the rooms for yoga, Zumba, Pilates, and aerobics; the gym, which can accommodate basketball or volleyball or the trending pickleball; a walking track; and an expansive fitness center, where exercisers on treadmills may be distracted by views of the rushing Dan River. There’s a massage room, a fancy machine to measure and record blood pressure, and another to measure weight and body fat. Some 2,500 square feet of physical therapy and rehab space is leased by the Danville Regional Medical Center (which is now part of Sovah Health).

In the social space at the entry, featuring an 18-by-18-foot glass donor wall that you can’t miss, several older men sat with coffee and newspapers, shooting the breeze. The child-care center, which was funded by the Hughes Memorial Foundation, offers after-school care and summer programs. A separate “child watch” room gives up to two hours of free child care for exercising parents, included in the $65 family fee. Those rooms were buzzing, as school had just ended for the year. The Y also offers after-school child care at four different elementary schools around the county, where Y staff uses the facilities of the school, and children can stay put. Of course, I noticed the six-lane pool, quietly hoping for my chance to swim later in the morning.

To Danville, the Y is more than its stunning physical plant. In a town where you see the occasional remnant of self-advertising as “the last capital of the Confederacy” (somewhat of a stretch, as Jefferson Davis hunkered down in Danville for just the single final week before the end of the Civil War), the Y serves a membership today that reflects Danville’s nearly half-white and half-African-American population. The 100 or so people I saw on my morning at the Y were mixed in about the same proportion.

We’re a “community within a community,” Sarah Folmar said. “When so much going on in the world is negative, even in the city of Danville, inside these four walls, everything changes. It is a positive place.”

We made our tour slowly, as Folmar greeted what seemed to me about half the members by name, inquiring about family and how they’re feeling. And they greeted back. A 93-year-old man was resting on the exercise equipment; two young women, who call themselves the River City Belles, were recording a live Facebook feed about healthy eating.

I also met, by name, every one of the staff who was present that morning. Several were discussing ideas from the professional training sessions they had recently attended. Staff interviews are thorough, and the retention rate is high. A telling question in the interview process is a self-rating on a scale of 1 to 10 of smile-ability. “Anything less than a 10,” reports Folmar, “and it’s not the place for them.” She added, as an afterthought, “A hundred is even better!”

Each of the 2,700 Ys in the U.S. has its own personal stamp. They all belong to the 175-year-old national organization, which offers various resources like help with strategic planning, big-picture marketing, and training in exchange for membership dues. The Y in Danville also belongs to the Virginia Alliance of YMCAs, which advises on state-relevant initiatives, like diabetes prevention and water safety. Beyond that, each local Y is independent and autonomous, with its own fiscal and governing responsibilities, but free to be the “heartbeat of the community,” as Folmar describes the Y in Danville.

The stamp of the YMCA (for Young Men’s Christian Association, of course) in Danville showed a stronger Christian element than I saw in most other Ys that I visited. It makes sense; Danville is a churchgoing town. The question that Danvillians are likely to ask of newcomers, several residents told me, is not “Where are you from?” or “What do you do?” but “Do you have a church yet?” Folmar reported that one of the most popular merchandise items at the Y is a T-shirt with a Bible verse printed on it. And a fishbowl in the workout space, which would likely be filled with mints or candies at other Ys, was filled here with strips of paper containing Bible verses. I had seen one other so filled, in northeastern Mississippi.

I found in Danville, as I had in most other towns, that the Ys and public sports complexes were my second-favorite spots—runner-up to the public libraries—to reveal the culture and mood of a town and to rub shoulders (literally) with folks I otherwise would be unlikely to meet. The Ys also shared the democratic nature of public libraries, where OPEN TO ALL, as is carved in granite above the Columbus, Ohio, main library door, refers to every single person, including the homeless, at no cost. The last two words of the Danville YMCA mission statement, “for all,” echo “open to all.” Folmar points out in full disclosure, “We are a membership organization.” But she explained that the Y offers reduced-fee memberships; last year, the Y gave away more than $135,000 in scholarships, and its goal is for no one to be turned away because of financial hardship.

By one measure, the new Y is a roaring success. Before it opened, Y membership in Danville was 2,300. Today, just five years later, it is 9,000. By another measure, there is still serious work to do. The latest Regional Report Card, including 2016 health data from Danville, commissioned by the Danville Regional Foundation, shows a lot of work still left to do. Compared with Virginia as a whole, the adult obesity rate, adult smoking, diabetes, and physical inactivity in Danville are all higher.

About an hour and a half later, our tour concluded, and Folmar asked if I would like to swim. Yes. The water-aerobics class had ended, and I shared the six-lane pool with just a few other swimmers. Folmar’s final gesture: As I traveled light and had forgotten a towel, she lent me her own.

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